The most fertile crop is always in the fields of another and he has the most fertile cattle.

It is claimed in some quarters that this is the origin of ‘the grass is always greener’. It may well express the same sentiment as our modern version but it is unlikely in the extreme that there is any kind of link between the two. Anyway Ovid distinctly mentions cattle, missing in the modern version.

In my travels, actually in my Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (in which there is neither hide not hair of ‘the grass is always greener’) I also came across:

Hills are green far away.

which I will now use as a substitute.

Essentially, despite some enjoyable research, I found nothing of any use to the original question as to the origins of either ‘Il piatto del vicino è sempre più buono …’ or the grass is …

I’ve always found it intriguing how many (almost) word for words translations exist between proverbs in Italian, Spanish and English.

I wonder if some of them entered the English language through French back in the day?

Some time back I wrote that I was keen to learn start learning German in the near future for a trip around parts of Europe, along with the queen of my heart.

Well, the time to begin has now arrived, or to be more precise arrived six days ago, when I bought, received and started Assimil German.

I am a more or less total beginner having spent a month using the rather turgid barons FSI course before buying the Assimil German course.

I am completely intrigued to see how much it is possible to learn in 30 minutes a day. This is the amount of time recommended at the start of the book.

I will according to page VII:

gain a conversational knowledge of German within a few months

Excellent. That seems like a good time investment.

I have previously used Assimil Polish with patchy results.

Thirty minutes a day wasn’t enough for me to learn each Polish lesson and I spent much longer. Now it is possible that this was my mistake. The beginning of the book warns sternly against spending too long studying.

I was using the French version of Asimil Polish which suggests not doing to much in case you:

surcharger voter mémoire

overload your memory. I don’t know if this is a particularly French concept but the same advice isn’t given in the English version of Assimil German:)

I must have been overly diligent and spend too much time using Assimil Polish.

Well I’m not going to make the same mistake again, and will only spend a maximum of thirty minutes a day studying Assimil German.

I might also have learnt something from my Polish experience. I am just going to use Assimil over the next 150 days and see where it takes me.

There are 100 lessons in all.

Each day you do one lesson after which where you aim to understand the German without looking at the English. After day fifty, you not only do lesson 51 but also return to lesson 1 in the ‘so called’ active phase. At this point, you try and translate each lesson from English to German.